NEW YORK (Reuters) - Police in the United States and Italy
arrested 77 suspected members of the Mafia on Thursday,
including some of its most wanted leaders, for an array of
crimes going back more than 30 years.

The three-year joint investigation sought to prevent
organized crime in New York and Sicily from reuniting their
drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations, officials in
both countries said.

U.S. authorities rounded up 58 suspects with the help of an
informant deep inside the Gambino crime family. Police said the
source helped nail the three top Gambino members not already in
jail.

ADVERTISEMENT

A U.S. grand jury indicted 62 suspects with charges
including murder, extortion, loan-sharking, gambling, cocaine
and marijuana distribution, money laundering, bribing labor
officials and embezzling union funds, U.S. and New York state
officials said.

"Organized crime still exists," New York state Attorney
General Andrew Cuomo told a news conference. "We like to think
it's a vestige of the past. It's not. It is as unrelenting as
weeds that continue to sprout in the cracks in society."

The U.S. investigation focused on the Gambino family once
run by the late John Gotti. The indictment charges one Gambino
family soldier, Charles Carneglia, with at least five murders
dating to 1976.

Associates of the Genovese and Bonanno families were also
arrested.

More than 300 Italian police were mobilized, mostly in
Sicily, in an operation code-named "Old Bridge," arresting 19
suspects and filing new allegations against four others already
detained for separate crimes.

Italian prosecutors said the operation sought to block the
re-establishment of the New York-Palermo axis, which ran drug
trafficking in the 1980s.

"There was an attempt to rekindle ties between Cosa Nostra
in Palermo and New York because the Sicilian Mafia wanted to
get back into drug trafficking in a big way," top anti-Mafia
prosecutor Francesco Messineo told reporters in Rome.

The joint probe focused on the Inzerillo family, which was
forced to leave Sicily in the 1980s after a Mafia turf war and
rebased in the United States. They became known as "the
runaways" and there was a split in the Sicilian Mafia over
whether they should be allowed to return.

Among those arrested were suspects linked to Salvatore Lo
Piccolo, who was arrested on November 5 in Sicily. He had
become the new "boss of bosses" after the arrest in 2006 of
Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run for 43 years.

Caretaker Prime Minister Romano Prodi praised what he
called a "brilliant operation against organized crime."

In what appeared to be a separate operation in Naples,
police arrested a suspected leading figure of that southern
city's criminal underworld on Thursday.

Vincenzo Licciardi, 42, purportedly a boss of the Camorra
crime group, was arrested in a Naples suburb. He had been on
the run since 2004 and was one of Italy's 30 most wanted
criminals, police said.